Cockeyed (11 page)

Before they said anything about my cane, or how spiffy it was, or how it wasn't what they were after, I felt Jane's hand snatch my elbow and pull. We walked quickly, and that is a hard thing for a blind person to do with any conviction or grace.

We scooted around the corner a couple of blocks. When Jane couldn't see them anymore, we resumed our usual pace, this time with my hand on her guiding elbow.

“What the hell was that about?” I asked. “I think they wanted my money or something. They asked what I had, and I said this was my cane. But I don't think that's what they were asking.”

Before I could say anything more, I heard footsteps coming from behind us, again. Fast footsteps.

My shoulders hunched the way someone might brace themselves against an oncoming dump truck. Jane turned when I froze, saw my shadowmen, and bolted. This time, in her own self-preserving haste, she forgot to take me with her. The two men were on either side of me all over again. They still had issues with personal space.

“Hey, man!” one of them yelled, although they didn't need to get my attention. “You gotta understand somethin', know what I'm saying?”

I nodded, but I hadn't a clue. I figured I would soon enough.

“We, like, didn't know y'all couldn't see nothin', like, bein' blind and all, and so we just wanted to say sorry, know what I'm sayin'?”

“No problem, no worry,” I sputtered.

“Yeah,” the other voice said, “sorry about that shit. You look like fucking some normal guy, you know what I'm sayin'? You look like just some guy, and we didn't mean to get into your shit or nothin'. You don't look like a blind guy, you know that?”

I nodded in agreement.

“And I respect your peoples and what you got to deal with, man. We cool?”

My people and I were cool. The two men patted me once on the shoulder as they left, as if we were buddies, or I was a pet.

Although I was fine, that night didn't sit well with me for the rest of our trip. Something had, in the end, been taken from me, something very small. A strange kind of dignity, maybe. In its place remained an alien resentment. I know it seems daft, really, but how does one get justice for not having been mugged? It's a real question, although not a high priority. For what it's worth, I learned this much—even commonplace violence and social dangers can't give me a fair shake. Discrimination feels like discrimination, even when it's for the best. My generation has been so socialized into our rights and so schooled away from discriminations of any kind, I didn't know how to be thankful. Thank you for stereotyping me. Thanks for excluding me from your violence, although I'm a relatively affluent tourist. Gratitude for being spared is something of a double bind. I wanted to lose. I wanted to lose like everybody else in order to keep that bit of dignity.

Somewhere there's a picture of my trip to New Orleans. Jane and I took a tour of the bayous on our last day. We'd heard about a guy named Sirus who operated a shrimp boat and ran a little tourist junket on the side. First he'd check his traps, then take you into the maze of ancient waterways where, at some point, he'd stop his big flat-bottomed boat and coax some alligators into the water. Marshmallows were
his preferred bait. He also had a pet gator he brought with him on the trip. You could hold it.

I got on the boat and looked around for his pet but couldn't find its shape. That bothered me. A lot. The last thing I needed was to step on an alligator or to poke it with my cane. It was a big boat, though, with lots of benches, coils of rope stacked here and there, and all sorts of traps and equipment under tarps. The alligator could be anywhere.

Later, while the eight of us who'd paid for the trip ogled at the few alligators Sirus had coaxed from the banks, he walked behind the wheel of the boat, pulled away a blanket and picked up his five-foot long pet. I couldn't see what he carried, but I figured it out when the Texan woman next to me shrieked and launched into prayer. Apparently she hadn't read the whole brochure.

Sirus calmed her down and explained that the reptile was his pet. “Lady, she's a tame.” He repeated, “Lady, she's a tame.”

“But it looks so real!” the Texan exclaimed.

Pets are, for some, a set of unreal animals.

“She is real,” Sirus said and tried to hand the gator to our praying Texan. She refused. Sirus turned to me. “How about you?” he asked. “You wanna hold her?”

Before I could answer, I had an alligator in my arms. The tail drooped down under its own weight. Sirus's pet felt like a bag of muscle. A very fine bag of muscle. It suffered the indignity of us all with an ancient patience I could only envy.

“Let me take a picture.” Jane began to fumble with the camera.

I didn't want to betray how uncomfortable I felt, holding this thing, but the camera got it out of me. At home, Jane would describe the photo. She said that the alligator and I look like we're both smiling, but we aren't. We wanted to get our time together over with and do it before anybody got hurt.

So did Jane.

People ask me what I hate most about blindness. A good answer would be blindness. I hate blindness most about blindness, but that's usually not what folks are after. Pick something, they say, something specific. Pushed to choose one big-time irritant, I'll go on the permanent record with public washrooms. They're a consistent disaster. On a good day, the public john for John Q. Public only proves, once and for all, hell is made of porcelain.

Let's say I've got a kindly waitress on my arm, one who's willing to make the long march with me. I know I should be relieved for the guiding hand, and I am, yet my gratitude is smothered by how excruciating it is, at the age of thirty-three, to have someone take me to the can. Maybe at seventy or eighty I could accept this as a fact of late life. We all hope the golden years will soften our pride, but I doubt it. Nonetheless, it's downright impossible to look and feel okay when, beyond the age of four, you must ask around for help with a potty trip.

But asking for help isn't what I worry about most these days. Getting through the door alone, that's the real pressure point.

The drama of approaching the men's room with a waitress on my arm is somewhat like a first date. At the door we're faced with the awkward problem of how to say goodbye, or whether we will. While I'm thanking her for the help, we'll both wonder if we'll shake hands and call it a night, no invitations inside this evening. Or, she will worry aloud, “Do you need me to follow you?” Or I will worry she's worried about this, and so on and so forth goes the neurotic ping-pong.

My anxiety is justified. I've learned there's no underestimating the verve with which some people will play Good Samaritan to the disabled. Even though I insist I don't need a hand beyond the door, sometimes this is mistaken for shyness or a silly desire not to be an imposition, particularly an imposition on a stranger who makes eight bucks an hour delivering burgers to tables, not blind men to urinals.

It's no problem, really, I assure her. Just point me in the right direction, I say, and send me in the room, white cane swinging. If nobody's in the men's room, I'll crash around and find the urinal myself. What I won't mention is that the only danger in going it alone is determining if I'm in front of a urinal or between two of them. I could feel for the layout with my cane, but a cane doesn't tell me if I'm connecting with the outside or inside edges. The best proof is in running a hand around whatever is in front of me. Just think about it.

I'm sorry to say, but that's where I draw the line. Admit it, you wouldn't run a hand around a urinal either. Standing in front of my best guess, I take my chances, and I'm sorry for the occasional misjudgment. You have to draw the line somewhere, preferably with a stick and not a finger.

Misjudgments remain a less humiliating prospect than the alternatives. Once a waiter dragged me by my arm through the door and into the washroom and swung me into an empty stall. “No need! No, there's no need,” I pleaded, but he hauled me through the busy washroom with cheery assurances. I don't know what I did to deserve such kindness. It's hard to be snarky when someone is aiming for helpful. Yet, when he chirped, “Here you are. If you need anything else, I'll just be waiting right outside the door,” who could possibly go?

When it comes to the men's room, I realize I'm doomed to a lifetime in the Freudian twilight zone of toilet training and independence. Most of the time, all I wanted was directions.

Once I asked for directions from a blurry red-headed waitress. She sidled up to my table's edge, surrounded by a perfumey fog. I began to fret. I was having a slow summer lunch at a Milestone's franchise in suburban Langley, my old hometown. More than usual I was hand-wringing about help to the men's room because, this being my hometown, I didn't know who might be watching or, worse, who my guiding waitress might be. What I did know was she wore a lot of the perfume aptly called Poison, and the scent gave me a double take.

Let me put an urban myth to rest. The myth of supersenses isn't true. When you're blind, your sense of smell does not, in my experience, rival Superman's. What happens is you make smell perform new, unconscious tasks, such as recognizing people. The brain may have previously given that function to sight, but new neural pathways grow between compensatory senses. In my daily comings and goings, a smell or a voice
now evokes a friendly recognition for me as powerful as a distant profile or familiar face once did. Now that I'm blind, a smell can grab as it goes by, the way a glimpse could once snag my curiosity.

This waitress turned my head with the smell of Poison. Its sticky sweetness caught my attention like flypaper on my eyeball, tugging my nose towards her with recognition. The Poison told me I might be about to ask Heidi for washroom guidance.

Heidi was a legendary high school debutante who, back in grade eleven, only dated keggers, those jockish guys who loafed around basketball courts, drove convertible VW Cabriolets, and worked weekends singing fraternity versions of “Happy Birthday” at The Keg. Cosmic justice dictates that most should still be slinging lager there, but I'm sure most made out just fine in the dot-com boom. For some reason—a reason indigenous only to a John Hughes storyboard—Heidi took an interest in me for three weeks in grade eleven, much to every Polo-wearing boy's dismay, and much to my slack-jawed astonishment. Our match was, in high school paradigms, unnatural. Maybe her short-lived attraction to me was an impaired judgment caused by the chronic haze of Poison she wore. Who knows. Mine wasn't to question such a gift as her.

She dumped me after those blissful three weeks, and, what's worse, dumped me for a twenty-one-year-old security guard from Willowbrook Mall. He had an orange sports car and a moustache. I couldn't compete. Although Heidi and I were an unlawful match in the high school order, our breakup
was highly orthodox. You are always dumped for someone you perceive to be your inferior. It allows you the cold comfort of calling rejection by its less painful name: injustice.

Now, here I was, years later, reawakened to my past humiliation, blind, and possibly about to ask Heidi for a tender hand to the commode.

“Would you like some more coffee?” asked the blur who might be her.

“I'd love some coffee, but I'd love to be in your washroom even more.”

Yes, “creepy” is a good word for my attempt at a charming phrase.

“Uh, the men's room is just over that way,” she said.

I stared vacantly ahead, and she, I imagine, continued to point wherever “that way” aimed. Then I heard the pleasant sound of coffee pouring.

“I'm sorry,” I interrupted. “I don't know what that means. I don't know what that way means.” I plucked my white cane from the bag beside me. “See?” I showed her. “I guess it wasn't obvious, and I forgot to mention—”

“Oh my god! I'm so sorry, I didn't know you were blind! You didn't look—You don't look. . . . Not at all, really.”

I smiled with that warm feeling you get when you're sixteen and someone says you look like you're in your twenties. Maybe it wouldn't be so awful to run into Heidi after all.

“Thanks, that's very kind. Where'd you say that washroom is?”

“Oh, right. The men's room is at the back.”

“Where's the back?”

“Over there,” she said, and walked away.

All I wanted were directions, but, instead, my waitress had pointed to the blind spots in language. They'd eroded at some point along with my eyesight. In the nature of blind spots, I hadn't noticed this new one, until she pointed to it.

You could say my waitress diagnosed a condition in language parallel to the one my doctor had found in my retinas. My peripheral vision was almost gone, and language's ability to point and refer had narrowed, too. Those bits of language are over there, that way. Some are right here, in front of you. Here. No, here. Right there, in the way we speak.

What's odd, though, is they are not the elements of language most blind people prickle about. Usually blind militants tub-thump about the sight-centred features of English idiom. Look at you! What a sight you are! A real looker. And you're a vision. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So nice to see you! Things looking up? I've had my eye on you, so I looked into it, kept my eyes peeled, and here you are, a sight for sore eyes, but no eyesore. Out of sight! What have you got your sights on these days? Look out! Watch it! Be on the lookout, keep your eye on the ball. I'll see to it. See you later? See you around. See?

On the flip side, English encourages the use of derogative blindness metaphors to mean things other than “without sight.” Some of these connotations include ignorant, limited, deranged, deceived, terminal, stupid, false, naïve, and, of course, confused.